BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
The shelves of Biography are the ultimate leveller: here, those who have transformed history lie side-by-side with contemporary storytellers exploring both unique and universal aspects of human experience. It's an esoteric bunch - and we bring you the best of it!
Below you will find our selections of the best new biographies and memoirs, and an array of our favourite biographies of all time.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
Being Old...and learning to love it!
Prue Leith
Another World
Melvyn Bragg
Leaving Home
Mark Haddon
A Hymn to Life
Gisèle Pelicot
Death of an Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry
George Orwell
Robert Colls
Fires Which Burned Brightly
Sebastian Faulks
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear
Gyles Brandreth
The Leopard in my House
Mark Steel
Electric Spark
Frances Wilson
Finding Albion
Zakia Sewell
Funny Thing, Getting Older
Michael Morpurgo
Finding My Way
Malala Yousafzai
Heartbeats
Björn Borg
Michael Palin in Venezuela
Michael Palin
I Shop, Therefore I Am
Mary Portas
Book of Lives
Margaret Atwood
What Have I Done?
Ben Elton
A Complicated Woman
Rebecca Lucy Taylor
Manners and Mischief
Anne Glenconner
William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
Philip Hoare
Inside
Boris Becker
All the Best for the Future
Greg James
Our Daily War
Andrey Kurkov
Raising Hare
Chloe Dalton
Two Women Living Together
Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo
On the Couch
Andrew Jamieson
The Absence
Budgie
If Only You Knew
Lulu
Jane Austen
Caroline Sanderson
The Heart-Shaped Tin
Bee Wilson
The Place of Tides
James Rebanks
White Male Stand-Up
Alan Davies
Between Two Waters
Pam Brunton
Middleland
Rory Stewart
Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain
Strong Roots
Olia Hercules
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Arundhati Roy
Young Once
Nigel Planer
A Wilder Way
Poppy Okotcha
Gertrude Stein
Francesca Wade
William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
Philip Hoare
Driven
Susie Wolff
Bread of Angels
Patti Smith
All or Nothing
Michael Wolff
Beyond the Line
Ben Youngs
The Colour of Home
Sajid Javid
Deep House
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Diddly Squat: The Farmer's Dog
Jeremy Clarkson
The Difficult Ghost
Leila Guerriero
Feeling Fabulous
Ruth Langsford
Never
Rick Astley
Night People
Mark Ronson
Simply More
Cynthia Erivo
Tart
Slutty Cheff
The Trading Game
Gary Stevenson
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
Hu Anyan
Question 7
Richard Flanagan
A Spy Amongst Us
Marc Mierowsky
To the Eel Island
Dr. Charles Moseley
What I Ate in One Year
Stanley Tucci
All the Way to the River
Elizabeth Gilbert
Always Home, Always Homesick
Hannah Kent
The Fun Lovin’ Criminal
Huey Morgan
I'm Glad My Mom Died
Jennette McCurdy
The Loves of My Life
Edmund White
My Next Breath
Jeremy Renner
Overnight
Dan Richards
The Shetland Way
Marianne Brown
Swimmingly
Vassos Alexander
This Is the Door
Darcey Steinke
Vagabond
Tim Curry
Death of an Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry
Last Words
Richard Holloway
Nobody's Girl
Virginia Roberts Giuffre
The North Pole
Erling Kagge
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between
Ruth Jones and James Corden
A Different Kind of Power
Jacinda Ardern
All Before Me
Esther Rutter
Bloody Dangerous
Colin Bell
In the Hide
Gordon Buchanan
Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure
Andy Wilman
The Post Office Scandal and Me
Jo Hamilton
Ring of Salt: Finding home and hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland
Betsy Cornwell
Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis
Priscilla Presley
Strong Roots
Olia Hercules
Three Years On Fire
Andrey Kurkov
Toni at Random
Dana A. Williams
Cat On The Road To Findout
Yusuf/Cat Stevens
Home
India Knight
Our Oaken Bones
Merlin Hanbury-Tenison
Little Ruins
Manni Coe
Frankly
Nicola Sturgeon
Leaving Home
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.
Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Sarah joined Facebook believing the company could change things for the better. Instead, what she encountered over seven years was so shocking that Meta obtained a legal order to silence her.
Now you can read her award-winning story. Candid and entertaining, Wynn-Williams’ account pulls back the curtain on Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the global elite. She exposes the true cost of Silicon Valley’s ambition, from outrageous schemes cooked up on private jets to the alarming consequences of Facebook’s aggressive pursuit of global dominance.
A Bookseller Recommends...
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.
‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
Love Divine
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee
An Englishman's Commonplace Book
Roger Hudson
Blood Knots
A Boy at the Hogarth Press & A Parcel of Time
Richard Kennedy
Period Piece
Gwen Raverat
The Road to Waterloo
Ronald Welch
Ensign Carey
Ronald Welch
Terms & Conditions
Ysenda Maxtone-Graham
84, Charing Cross Road
Helene Hanff
Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee
A Countryman's Spring Notebook
Adrian Bell
A Countryman's Summer Notebook
Letters to Michael
Charles Phillipson
Another Self
James Lees-Milne
Basil Street Blues
Michael Holroyd
The Blue Field
John Moore
Blue Remembered Hills
Rosemary Sutcliff
Boy
Roald Dahl
Brendon Chase
The Cherry Tree
Adrian Bell
A Classical Education
Richard Cobb
Conundrum
Jan Morris
Corduroy
Adrian Bell
A Countryman's Autumn Notebook
Dawn Wind
Rosemary Sutcliff
Escape from France
Ronald Welch
First Light
Geoffrey Wellum
Frontier Wolf
Rosemary Sutcliff
Giving up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel
Going Solo
Roald Dahl
Hons and Rebels
Jessica Mitford
The House of Elrig
Gavin Maxwell
I Was a Stranger
John Hackett
The Lantern Bearers
Rosemary Sutcliff
Lark Rise
Flora Thompson
Mr Tibbits's Catholic School
Ysenda Maxtone-Graham
Portrait of a Marriage
Nigel Nicolson
Over to Candleford & Candleford Green
Flora Thompson
My Grandmothers and I
Diana Holman-Hunt
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is. Shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.
Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
Electric Spark
Frances Wilson
From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events.
Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ‘Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes’. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.
Sleepless
Marie Darrieussecq
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Baek Sehee
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
Do No Harm
Henry Marsh
Zami
Audre Lorde
Stories of the Sahara
Sanmao
Know My Name
Chanel Miller
Down Below
Leonora Carrington and Marina Warner
A Heart That Works
Rob Delaney
Inferno
Catherine Cho
King Kong Theory
Virginie Despentes
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Sontag
Benjamin Moser
Things I Don't Want to Know
Deborah Levy
Super-Infinite
Katherine Rundell
An Apartment on Uranus
Paul B. Preciado
There's Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib
How to End a Story
Helen Garner
Masquerade
Oliver Soden
On Chapel Sands
Laura Cumming
Who Killed My Father
Édouard Louis
Free
Lea Ypi
Wild Thing
Sue Prideaux
A Voyage Around the Queen
Craig Brown
